Gone
by Permanent
Summary: He's dead, one-shot.


"You're foolish," she murmured.

Cicadas chirped innocently.

It was a gloomy day as the great general "Dragon of the West," elder brother to Ozai and uncle to Zuko and Azula, Iroh had perished due to an unfortunate and rather uncannily coincidental tea poisoning. His gravestone with a formal picture of him in his general days stood right next to his prized son, Lu Ten, in Ba Sing Se. There was a rather crude drawing of a grinning Iroh in a straw hat (or at least she assumed), flowers from his friends, and a teapot for incense. She could guess who had placed the teapot.

Following his year of birth and year of death, the inscribed Chinese characters now read:

_In loving memory of_

_Iroh_

"Tea is not hot leaf juice!"

The thickly veiled woman gave a slight chuckle at the quote. Then she suddenly paused tensely. Someone else was here.

"You're here for Uncle Iroh?" a new voice inquired.

"Of course; why else would I be here?" she snapped.

It was Toph. Her blind eyes were shaded; she hadn't cried – yet.

She closed her eyes with some forced calm to soothe her anger; it was a skill hammered into her over the past few years. She recognized the slightly sharp, edgy voice but did not comment on that.

The woman tilted her veiled head upwards to the humongous, aging tree and the bright blue sky. Momo the Avatar's winged lemur was playing with frisky hybrid birds, scaring them away from their nests. This time, he was chased across the Ba Sing Se roofs by a larger, extremely angry male hybrid bird.

"It's about time," she mused to herself, but Toph's extremely sensitive ears heard her. The blind girl noticed the lady rapidly turning around and approaching her. There was a slight, perhaps electrical, tinge in her close presence as the stranger passed her.

She remembered.

"_Aang!" Katara cried urgently, shaking him from his drowsiness. "She's escaped!"_

"_Wha—?!" the young Avatar jolted from his sleepy composure as if a lightning bolt had struck him. "I made sure she couldn't bend. How did she—?"_

"_I don't know," she confessed. "When I visited the prison, I found the guards knocked out and the cell open. It looked like she was using some trick to escape."_

_Yes, it would make sense. For she was very much capable of that…_

"_Toph!" Aang said. "Make sure to inform Jun and send out a search party for her! Zuko should have known the news by now."_

"_No need to mention that, cap'n," Toph saluted. As she was on her way to the exit, a gasping messenger dashed past her. He looked as if he was utterly exhausted. Glancing at Aang and Katara, the messenger let out a huge sigh of relief before announcing his purpose of the visit._

"_Avatar… Iroh's dead." Then he passed out._

_There was an unhealthy silence, broken by the Avatar._

"_Toph… search party, please," Aang reminded her quietly but commandingly, looking at his hands. Katara closed her eyes, tears seeping out just as quietly down her cheeks._

_The earthbender was too shocked to answer verbally – in fact, she felt numb – but she carried out her duty faithfully as she hastily left the room. Then her furious thoughts took over, attacking her mind every time her feet touched the ground._

_Iroh… why did he have to die? And at a time like this…!_

Now that she remembered, she realized that maybe these events had_ something_ to do with each other. They just couldn't have been entirely coincidental.

"Wait!" Toph yelled. Momentarily forgetting her ability to earthbend, she ran after the disappearing veiled lady with all of her might.

The mourner paused, abruptly surrounded by the thick fog.

The young earthbender's eyes grew wide; she could not "see" any figures, let alone Momo and the band of birds running around angrily, nor could she hear any human heartbeat, let alone her own heartbeats. She moved her feet forward slowly though in panic, feeling the rocks and grass blades and flowers and an occasional insect. It didn't matter — she couldn't visualize them even though Toph knew they were there.

Was she losing her "sight?"

Then, in a matter of seconds, the fog cleared and it all came back. Bewildered, Toph blinked as her "sight" and distressingly familiar sounds of the cicadas returned, stronger than before. It felt _so_ good to be back to normal; she'd been really worried about losing her "sight" that it seemed ridiculous. Then she realized.

The stranger had disappeared.

Where did she go?

* * *

"What do you want, little girl?"

"Where's Azula?"

"…She's no longer part of this world."

* * *

_Edited 8/??/09_


End file.
